LITTLE ROCK — Fighting high water and a fast current, Little Rock firefighters held on to a woman’s body for nearly 40 minutes while trying to free her from debris that pinned her beneath a city park bridge Wednesday night.
Eventually the current proved too strong, Little Rock Fire Department Capt. Randy Hickmon said, and they lost her.
Crews stayed on Boyle Park’s low-water bridge until 1 a.m. Thursday hoping for a sign of the body.
And after a full day of searching the creeks in and around Boyle Park on Thursday, Hickmon said the body, which hasn’t been identified, is still missing.
Search crews will return today, Hickmon said.
The water from Wednesday’s flooding was still high Thursday, he said.
“We covered a large area, all the way to Fourche Creek,” Hickmon said. “Some areas we searched four times. But there’s only so much you can do on a body recovery underwater.”
Markey Haynes was walking through Boyle Park on his way home around 7:25 p.m. Wednesday, when he saw what he thought was a body trapped between some rocks at the bridge.
The water was too high and too fast to put a firefighter in the water that night, Hickmon said.
Instead of going in after the body, fire crews tried to get the body to come up to them by breaking up the debris piling up beneath the bridge in hopes that the body would come out the other end.
“When you have that kind of flow of water against anything it’s going to be hard,” Hickmon said. “There was no getting her out ... I’m guessing she went down to the bottom and [drifted unseen] downstream.”
The Fire Department’s search-and-rescue teams combed the water, which was still high, as well as the banks in Boyle Park from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Thursday, and were joined by the Little Rock Police Department’s rarely used helicopter, but still had no results.
The woman, described as Asian with dark hair, doesn’t fit any recent missing persons reports, police spokesman Lt. Terry Hastings said.
Hickmon said first responders couldn’t tell how long the body had been in the water, and Hastings said that until the body is recovered and an autopsy is performed, there’s no telling how the woman died or how her body reached the creek.
For now, Hickmon said, fire crews need lower water before they have a good chance of finding her.
“Usually you can see the bottom [of the creek bed] but there are pools 15, 20 feet deep,” Hickmon said. “She was tangled in with debris that went out [from under the bridge] ... all the way to the Arkansas [River]. We don’t think that happened [to her], but we have no idea.”
Arkansas, Pages 11 on 03/23/2012